Susan Delacourt: Is COVID-19 the antidote to Trump-style populism in Canada?

In the aftermath of unexpected election victory in 2016, and his Liberals went out looking for a vaccine against populism.

Four years later, an antidote has been found, in the unlikely form of a global pandemic.

With Trump facing his reckoning with the ballot box next week in the U.S., evidence continues to mount that has seriously weakened the spread of Trump-style populism into this country.

The latest comes in a report out this week from the Samara organization, charting a “profound change in the hearts and minds of Canadians” when it comes to trust in government and institutions. Even as the virus has been rippling through the country, Canadians are feeling much more positive in 2020 about how they’re governed, , and a lot less nostalgic for bygone times.

This isn’t the year to launch a “Make Canada Great Again” campaign, in other words, unless you’re talking about turning the clock back eight or so months.

Samara’s report is based on research carried out by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy, also known as C-Dem — a partnership of academic researchers and civil society groups doing extensive polling on the democratic health of the country.

Satisfaction with how Canadian democracy is functioning is up seven percentage points from last year, according to this polling. Confidence in the federal government was up a whopping 21 percentage points, while provincial governments saw an even larger, 24 per cent increase on the same question.

“Barely half of Canadians think governments ‘used to be better at getting things done,’ compared to two-thirds just a year ago,” the Samara report goes on to say. “This is a remarkable shift to observe in a year when life became almost universally more difficult.”

Granted, the C-Dem survey was carried out in May, before Justin Trudeau’s government weathered the WE Charity controversy and while Canada was still in the early months of the COVID crisis.

But other polls have been tracking the same trend away from populism, notably a large Canada-U.S. survey carried out by Innovative Research several weeks ago, and over the Thanksgiving weekend.

The C-Dem/Samara survey, based on 8,170 responses gathered online earlier this year also found — as the Innovative Research study did — that people are more inclined to trust experts in 2020 and less confident in the wisdom of “ordinary people.”

Many Canadian politics-watchers, including this writer, were saying when Trump was first elected that it would be more difficult for MAGA-style populism to catch on here, simply because we’re a less polarized country.

But still, federal Liberals fretted. Trudeau launched a series of cross-country town hall meetings in January 2017 and delivered a major speech in Hamburg, Germany in February sounding an alarm about the politics of “us-versus-them” and economic anxiety turning into anti-government anger.

A year later, Doug Ford was supposed to be the next Trump when he ascended to power, but the Ontario premier has gone right off the U.S. president, as evidenced by the gagging gesture he displayed in earlier this month.

People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier gave Trump-style populism a run too, but he fared dismally in last year’s election campaign and couldn’t manage to get more than 3.6 per cent of the vote in this week’s byelection in York Centre.

You don’t need a doctorate in political science to understand why populism’s charm has faded through the pandemic — at least the populism that is defined by mistrust of governments and experts.

Governments are helping people hold their lives together and experts, specifically public-health officials, are helping save lives. All Canadians need to do is glance south to see what happens when politicians drop the ball or ignore the medical advice they’re getting.

Canada didn’t shut its border with the U.S. when Trump got elected, but it’s shut now to most traffic, and it seems clear that we’re happy to keep it closed — not just to keep out the virus, but to shield us from the populist sentiments that Trump is still trying to whip up in his bid for re-election next week.

The Samara report warns that this pandemic-inspired turn against populism might be more momentary than enduring, and that Canadians are still feeling powerless to change the course of government too. But who isn’t feeling powerless in 2020 — besides Trump, of course, who has been telling Americans that the virus can be dismissed with sufficient will.

Four years after Trump was elected, and on the eve of his date with re-election destiny, his brand of populism is no longer the most-feared virus in Canada.

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt